Prohibition Is the Problem, Not Drugs: Why the War on Drugs Has to Die

We’ve spent over 50 years and trillions of dollars trying to wage war on people’s chemistry. The result? More deaths, more prisons, more corruption, more cartel power, and absolutely no “drug-free” anything. The war on drugs didn’t fail; it did exactly what it was built to do: criminalize the poor, control dissent, and funnel public money into prisons, police, and corporate pockets.

If you care about civil liberties, bodily autonomy, or basic evidence, there’s no honest way to defend prohibition. It’s not a policy mistake. It’s a system functioning as designed—and that’s exactly why it has to go.

Prohibition Is Not About Safety. It Never Was.

Politicians love to pretend drug laws exist to “protect communities” and “keep people safe.” That story falls apart the second you look at how these laws are enforced—or who gets rich off them.

Let’s start with something the drug warriors don’t like to talk about: legal drugs. Alcohol kills around 3 million people globally each year, according to the World Health Organization. Tobacco? Around 8 million deaths per year. These aren’t underground, mystery powders. These are heavily marketed, tax-generating, fully legal substances sold by corporations with lobbyists bigger than most countries’ health budgets.

If our governments were sincerely obsessed with “saving lives from dangerous substances,” alcohol and tobacco would be schedule-one, SWAT-team material. Instead, they’re sold at the grocery store while you’re lectured about the dangers of a joint, a pill, or a line. It’s not about safety. It’s about who profits and who gets punished.

The War on Drugs Was Built on Lies—and Admitted Ones

The war on drugs didn’t emerge from some noble public health crusade. It was engineered as a tool of political control. We don’t even have to speculate; they literally admitted it.

John Ehrlichman, a top aide to U.S. President Richard Nixon, explained the strategy bluntly in a 1994 interview, later reported in Harper’s:

“The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and Black people… We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or Black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and Blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

That’s not a conspiracy theory. That’s an insider confession. The war on drugs was weaponized from the start—against political enemies and racial minorities. Every politician who still defends prohibition is defending that legacy, whether they admit it or not.

Concrete Example #1: Mass Incarceration by Design, Not Accident

In the United States, drug war policies helped turn the “land of the free” into the world’s largest jailer. Between 1980 and 2020, the number of people incarcerated for drug offenses in federal prisons mushroomed from about 25,000 to nearly 150,000. That’s not crime going up. That’s policy deliberately dragging more people into cages.

And who’s getting locked up? Not the board members of Purdue Pharma or the banks laundering cartel money. It’s overwhelmingly working-class people, especially people of color. Black Americans make up roughly 13% of the U.S. population but account for about one-third of drug-related arrests and a wildly disproportionate share of imprisonment for drug offenses. Study after study shows drug use rates are similar across races. Enforcement is not.

That’s not public health. That’s targeted punishment dressed in moral panic.

Concrete Example #2: Portugal Proved Prohibition Is Optional

In 2001, Portugal did something radical: it decriminalized the personal possession and use of all drugs. Not just cannabis. Heroin, cocaine, MDMA—the lot. They didn’t turn into some anarchic wasteland. They turned into one of the best real-world case studies that prohibition is a political choice, not a necessity.

Here’s what actually happened in Portugal after decriminalization:

• Overdose deaths plummeted. By the mid-2010s, Portugal’s drug-related death rate was one of the lowest in Western Europe—far below countries that stuck with hardline prohibition.
• HIV infections among people who use drugs dropped sharply due to needle exchanges and harm reduction services instead of criminalization.
• Drug use among youth did not explode into chaos. Some measures of adolescent drug use even decreased, contradicting the “if we stop punishing people, everyone will shoot heroin at brunch” fantasy.

Portugal didn’t “legalize” the supply side, so their model isn’t perfect. The unregulated market still exists. But they proved something essential: you can stop arresting users, stop destroying lives with criminal records, and outcomes actually improve. Imagine going further—full regulation, quality control, and evidence-based education. That’s where we should be headed.

Prohibition Creates the Very Harms It Pretends to Prevent

When you criminalize demand instead of regulating supply, you don’t get less use. You get more danger. Prohibition turns what could be a manageable risk into a lethal gamble.

Unregulated Supply = Russian Roulette

Because drugs are illegal, they’re produced and distributed by underground networks that have zero incentive to prioritize safety. There’s no dose label, no ingredients list, and no quality control—just profit and secrecy.

The fentanyl crisis is exhibit A. The substance itself isn’t some mystical demon; it’s a potent opioid with legitimate medical use. The problem is that prohibition pushed heroin and other opioids into riskier forms: dealers cutting drugs with fentanyl and analogues because they’re cheap, powerful, and easy to smuggle in tiny quantities.

In North America, this has turned the illicit opioid supply into a minefield. People think they’re buying heroin, oxy, or a counterfeit benzo and end up with a lethal dose of fentanyl or worse. Overdose deaths skyrocket—not because “drugs got more evil,” but because prohibition forced the market into maximum-potency, minimum-transparency mode.

If governments actually cared about preventing overdose deaths, they’d be funding safe supply programs and drug checking services everywhere instead of relying on law enforcement theater and PR-friendly crackdowns. But those don’t feed the prison-industrial complex or score “tough on crime” points, so here we are.

Violence Is a Policy Outcome, Not a Property of Drugs

Drug warriors love to point at cartel violence and say, “See? Drugs are dangerous.” No. Prohibition is dangerous. We learned this a century ago with alcohol. The U.S. banned booze in 1920 and immediately handed the alcohol market to organized crime. Cue the shootings, bootlegging, poisonings, and massive corruption. When Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the alcohol black market (and much of its violence) collapsed.

Now we’ve repeated the same mistake, but with more substances and bigger guns. Every time a government “cracks down” on supply, it doesn’t end demand; it hands more market share to whoever’s ruthless enough to operate under harsher conditions. The violence isn’t a side effect. It’s baked into the prohibition model.

The Hypocrisy: Corporate Highs Good, Personal Highs Bad

Let’s talk about who’s allowed to alter your consciousness.

Pharmaceutical companies aggressively marketed opioid painkillers like OxyContin for years, downplaying addiction risks so badly that Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family became global symbols of brazen, deadly greed. They helped fuel an opioid crisis that killed hundreds of thousands. Were they met with no-knock raids? Decades in prison? Asset forfeiture at gunpoint?

No. They got fines—business expenses, really. The company was restructured. The family kept their wealth. Meanwhile, someone using street opioids to stave off withdrawal or cope with untreated pain can end up with a felony record, lose their job, their housing, and sometimes their life.

Then there’s alcohol: the sponsor of sports events, plastered on billboards, embedded into social rituals. If you black out every weekend on vodka, you’re “just partying.” If you microdose LSD for creativity, or use MDMA to process trauma, you’re suddenly a criminal. The line between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” drugs is not pharmacology. It’s politics, culture, and money.

“But If We Legalize, Won’t Everyone Use Drugs?”

This is the favorite scare tactic: open the gates and society collapses into a hedonistic wasteland. It sounds dramatic. It’s also not supported by reality.

• Alcohol Prohibition Repeal: When the U.S. legalized alcohol again, society didn’t collapse; it stabilized. Violence related to illegal alcohol trade dropped significantly.
• Cannabis Legalization: In U.S. states that have legalized cannabis, we haven’t seen the apocalyptic surge in teen use claimed by prohibitionists. Some data suggests youth use stays flat or even declines slightly when regulated markets displace illicit ones and honest education replaces scare propaganda.
• Portugal’s Decriminalization: As mentioned, there was no mass explosion of use. The system shifted from punishment to support, and harms went down.

People don’t suddenly start injecting substances just because laws change. Drug use has existed in every culture, every era, under every legal framework. The real variables are: Is the supply safe? Are people informed? Is help available without punishment?

What a Post-Prohibition World Could Actually Look Like

Ending prohibition doesn’t mean chaos. It means finally governing drug use like the complex, normal human behavior it is, instead of pretending we can arrest it out of existence.

1. Legal, Regulated Markets for Adults

All currently illegal drugs should move into some form of legal, regulated supply for adults—tailored to the substance’s risk profile. That could include:

• Pharmacy-style models for some substances with trained staff and strict labeling.
• Licensed retail with potency caps, like we’ve started to see with cannabis.
• Medical or supervised models (e.g., prescription heroin/diacetylmorphine for dependent users) where appropriate.

We already regulate powerful substances—benzodiazepines, antidepressants, opioids—without banning them outright. Pretending we can’t do the same for currently illegal drugs is intellectual laziness or political cowardice.

2. Honest Drug Education, Not DARE-Style Propaganda

Most “education” campaigns are thinly disguised scare programs built to justify existing laws, not reduce harm. Telling people “just say no” and feeding them absurd exaggerations doesn’t build trust—it guarantees they’ll tune out when they need real information.

We need evidence-based education that:

• Teaches dose, set, and setting.
• Explains interactions and overdose risks without moralizing.
• Respects adults as capable of informed decisions.

Prohibitionists fear honest education because it undermines their fantasy that if we withhold knowledge, people won’t use drugs. That’s not how humans—or curiosity—work.

3. Harm Reduction as Default Policy, Not Fringe Charity

Needle exchanges, supervised consumption sites, drug checking, safe supply programs, low-barrier opioid substitution treatment—these aren’t radical; they’re basic public health tools with mountains of supporting data.

Countries like Canada and Switzerland have already shown that supervised injection facilities and heroin-assisted treatment can reduce overdoses, cut HIV transmission, and stabilize people’s lives. These interventions work even under the hostile conditions of partial prohibition. Imagine what they could do in a fully post-prohibition framework where people aren’t forced into hiding.

4. Decriminalization of Use and Possession—Everywhere

Full stop: no one should be arrested, fined, or otherwise punished for what they put in their own body. That includes personal possession, small-scale sharing, and social use. You don’t “fix” problematic drug use with police. You just pile trauma on top of trauma.

Decriminalization is the bare minimum, not the finish line. But it’s the line between pretending you’re running a health policy and admitting you’re running a punishment regime.

Why This Is About Freedom, Not Just Policy

Underneath all the stats and case studies is a basic question: Who owns your body? If the state can tell you what you may or may not do with your own neurochemistry, absent harm to others, then bodily autonomy is a slogan, not a right.

We don’t ban risky sports, unhealthy diets, or alcohol because they can be dangerous. We regulate and mitigate harm while respecting that adults have the right to make choices—even stupid ones. Drug prohibition is the glaring exception, not some principled stand on safety.

Ending the war on drugs isn’t a niche cause for “drug users.” It’s central to civil liberties, racial justice, privacy rights, and resisting an ever-expanding surveillance and carceral state. Every intrusive search, every no-knock raid, every civil asset forfeiture justified by “drug enforcement” is a reminder that prohibition is the Swiss Army knife of authoritarian policy.

Time to Stop Pretending This Can Be “Reformed”

We don’t need minor tweaks. We don’t need “smarter enforcement” or “harsher penalties for traffickers.” We’ve tried all that. The result is a thriving illegal market, overflowing prisons, preventable deaths, and a mountain of ruined lives.

The honest position is this:

• Prohibition is incompatible with evidence-based public health.
• Prohibition is incompatible with racial justice.
• Prohibition is incompatible with bodily autonomy and civil liberties.

The war on drugs is not a well-intentioned policy gone wrong. It is a tool of control, selectively enforced, economically convenient for some and catastrophically deadly for others. It will not become humane; it has to be dismantled.

Adults have the right to alter their consciousness. Governments have the responsibility to ensure that, if they do, they aren’t forced into the shadows to play chemical roulette with their lives. Everything else is just authoritarianism with a health-washed label.

Prohibition is the problem. It always has been. It’s time we say that clearly—and act like we mean it.

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Tags: drug policy, harm reduction, legalization, antiprohibit, opinion